3:AM Magazine

Shoplifting abroad & other poems

By Alison Graham.

Charcoal and halitosis

There are wasps in the barbecue
and i am having
a panic attack // there is
spilt fat in the barbecue and I am
sick on my veins // there is and i
am // there i a coward am
counting my breath in blocks
of ten and a friend told me to
keep from opacity so,
a panic attack –
eyeing the nettles, shrinking
at joggers and dreaming of xanax
like a lover who would be
kind // eating enough mints
to infill where my blood
would be.

Painted Icarus from the screen of a phone

(in the green) brittle glow of tunnel
it mulls the pavement. heads w/evergreen
tendons, slight inclined / the weight
a surgeon’s whetstone & upturned, as
a choir / bone china pulse blows out to the root,
circuit-board, like – it’s a knock
out! give him

an epithet, a good one. a bell tower is foal
– hobbling over a century turn, over
the proverbial hill / if the boy knew
to gnaw and kick; to keep to yr pedestal,
to better judgement / what gets u a rosebush jaw.

Demi moore
never did finish that vase. no one knows
if it’s Bruegel’s, but they care
like hammered papyrus.

heritage brims acrobatic, bears two lilies
deeply and crude jade in lust
with jeweller’s hands; (not a patch)
on fiberglass and its subsidiaries broiling
your phone. it is i think
hollow bc it picks
@ the strings of me
, wants carving out and almost, almost mylar
could be the name of a child.

thickly the midges clot the shade.

Shoplifting abroad

The basin floating
wood ash and candle jars
– and your French postcards.

Which were of no
consequence, which vapour
windows. And millefiori,

thousand buds in the hyaline.
Linear they did not want us to leave
in a glassmaker’s shop.

Kapnography is an art &
it is vulgar to ask for the exit.
Pier glass polemicist, you.

The minims of air in the vitrics
are gasping at this. Someone is
in joy crying the water unpotable.

Throw the rope to me –. And in this light
the sandbar bricks look a hundred years
and the sink gluts the hollows of my cheeks.

ABOUT THE AUTHORAlison Graham is a Norwich-based writer. Her first pamphlet was released earlier this year by Pyramid Editions.

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